Kishore Kumar for Anglophiles

He was born, I am told, on this day.
I remember his death better.
In Holland, on a cold autumn day, I heard of his death while on a business trip that extended to a vacation. That was a different age, a different me, and a different India. We didn't fly cheap to remote destinations. Travelling abroad was a rarity for most, if not many.
And we were all homesick, enough to miss the dust and embrace it fondly when we came back from our sojourns.
Kishore Kumar was the stuff such homesickness was made of.
I have childhood memories of Jewel Thief and Jhumroo songs, that went with the winter chill of Delhi, or the munched mungfalis that went well with the latest R.D. Burman hits on Vividh Bharati, better heard from the neighbour's radio than one's own. Talking of the neighbour's radio gives me the same romance that saying mungfali does, and I hate to translate that into "peanuts".
We were anglophiles, we were, but in a land that was our own.
We liked Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys, learnt to pronounce enclave as "aaanclaave" than "ennnnnnclayve" and thoughtlessly guzzled irrelevant stuff on Prince Charles. But we were Indian.
And we loved Kishore Kumar to prove it.
Like a subterranean subterfuge, his songs of sadness (profound) and joy (infectious), yodelling (whacko!), dancing (bad!) were part of our cherished emotional vagaries, enough to make us feel proudly and enthrallingly Indian. R.D.Burman provided a modern grist for this ancient mill, seductively importing Western tunes, but subtly conspiring to keep the classic-ethnic alive in its folds. We were, like RDB and KK, anglophiles of the fiercely Indian variety. In our minds and hearts, the Occidental has intervened and interfered, but KK's songs and Pancham's tunes tell us of our Eternal Originality.
Not for nothing do the French say: Le plus ca change, le pluse c'est le meme. The more it changes, the more it remains the same.